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That rumored Highlight
for T-Mobile is now official, filling yet another niche segment in
Samsung's massive full-touch attack on the carrier -- an attack
that now includes the Behold, the Memoir, and
this bad boy. As you might have gathered from the appearance, this
one comes in at the bottom end of that range, but it really doesn't
slack on the spec sheet -- it's still managing to pack AWS HSDPA, a
3 megapixel camera, WQVGA display, quadband EDGE for world travel,
AGPS, and a full HTML browser. It's available in two colors today
-- fire and ice, which are basically orange and a black / cool blue
combo -- for $149.99 on contract after rebates.
We've been toying around with the Highlight this week in its "fire"
livery, and we've got to say: for its entry-level aspirations,
we're really impressed. The TouchWiz UI is plenty speedy, the
browser was about as good as you could expect a Samsung dumbphone
browser to be, we had an easy time adapting to the landscape QWERTY
keyboard (and the numeric one, for that matter), and -- this is a
biggie -- the screen felt really good. Historically, some
of Sammy's full touch phones have had a reputation for having
really bendy plastic screen -- and yes, granted, this is clearly
still plastic, but it's thick and / or strong enough so that
there's virtually no give to it. That definitely makes you feel
more confident using the phone, and gives it a vaguely upmarket
appeal. Do we recommend it? If you're looking for a relatively
cheap way to get on T-Mobile's 3G network, yeah, absolutely, though
we might wait until they get their pricing strategy figured out --
it's clearly a lower-end device than the Behold and it needs to be
priced accordingly. If T-Mobile can manage to get it down to, say,
$79.99, it's an all-around winner.
